


The Wizard Beyond The Walls

by budchick



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling, Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Crossover, Gen, Giants, Magic, Muggle Technology, Worldbuilding
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-02-28
Updated: 2015-05-01
Packaged: 2018-03-15 14:10:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 19,651
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3450026
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/budchick/pseuds/budchick
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Having magic is such a hack. Being from the 20th century is a bigger one. Harry Potter gets dropped into Attack on Titans, and decides what this world needs is not a quick way to kill Titans, but a push into the Industrial Revolution.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

:::

The first thing Harry thought when he woke up, was that he was in some kind of national park.

Because the trees were huge. They went up and up and up, almost a hundred metres tall, and Harry, who was only used to apartment buildings and skyscrapers that tall, was slightly impressed.

The atmosphere felt that way as well. There were birds flying overhead, and a thriving ecosystem, and no matter where Harry looked, he couldn’t see the usual signs of human habitation – signs, rubbish on the ground, bits of plastic – not even signs.

And for a tree to get that big, they’d probably have to be protected by the government or something, otherwise a company would have harvested all this wood and sold it.

So – national park.

So – he needed to try and find a park ranger, who could then helpfully point out where he was, and from then, he could make calculations for a portkey, or apparate back to London without the fear of splinching from accidentally trying to apparate intercontinentally.

But right now, he was sitting on a rock in that forest, and marvelling at the size of the trees surrounding him.

“Tempus,” he said.

12.36pm.

The numbers appeared in the sky, and then faded.

It was odd that ‘tempus’ didn’t tell him today’s date, because that charm normally gave that too, but Harry wasn’t too concerned. He only wanted to know roughly how long it had been since breakfast.

Long enough to get lunch.

Harry carried his broom around with him everywhere, shrunken in a compartment in his belt, so he looked around for any sign of muggle activity in the area: muggles, muggle cameras, that sort of thing. Finding nothing, he pulled it out, unshrunk it, and then put on his invisibility cloak.

He made sure it covered him and the broom before he took off.

:::

Inventory:

Auror badge.

Dragonhide armour vest, fingerless gloves and boots. Otherwise, just the standard wizarding cloak and normal clothes.

A belt. It had multiple compartments with Undetectable Extension charms, and this was where he kept all his items. A wallet with his ID and muggle money. The galleons, sickles and knuts he kept in a moleskin pouch. Water bottle. Broom, shrunk and stored. A first aid kit for wizards with various potions, also shrunk and stored. The foe-glass and sneakoscope. The Invisibility Cloak. A shock baton, an eversharp steel knife in a sheath and handcuffs hung on the outside, for easy reach.

A wrist holster for his wand. An ankle holster inside his left boot for the Elder Wand, in case he needed extra firepower or backup – if he had to lose a wand first, he would rather lose the wand of Holly than the wand of Elder.

The Resurrection Stone, on a ring on his right hand.

:::

Harry was hovering above the canopy of the trees.

No lookouts. No roads. Not even power station lines.

Where the fuck was he?

The good news was that the forest had an end. He couldn’t see any highways from here – the black asphalt concrete roads he would’ve seen in an instant – but maybe there were walking trails somewhere.

He took a moment to scan the forest again just to check. In the meantime, he took his water bottle out, took a sip. It was nearly empty, so Harry used Aguamenti to draw water from the air and refill the bottle.

Then he flew even higher.

To understand how high he flew: the trees were about the height of some of the Quidditch stadiums he had flown in, from pitch to roof. Harry went about triple that height – upwards.

Villages off in the far distance. Lakes and rivers. Evidence of farmland.

Still no sign of any skyscrapers or cities.

Harry was flying at the height of some of the tallest buildings in the UK now, and he was hesitant to go any higher. He spun around in a circle, and noted that he could see a vague image of what looked like two long walls off in the horizon – one wall on the horizon in front of him, and one wall on the horizon behind him.

The horizon was a long way off though, especially considering how high up he was, so Harry thought that he would investigate that later.

He was trying to think of country-side areas with villages and walls, trying to place where he was, when he noticed that one of the landmarks that he was looking at – moving.

That couldn’t have been right.

As he looked closer, he saw that what he thought was a landmark – or an odd-looking rock, or statues that looked like humans – weren’t actually statues.

What were they?

:::

They couldn’t be human beings.

At his height, humans should’ve been nothing more than little ants – specks of black in his vision, but these things were visible, and they seemed to come in a variety of heights.  
There was a group of them near his forest of trees, so Harry was going to take a closer look at them.

It only took a couple of minutes to fly to the edge of the woods, and Harry slowed down as he came closer.

It took him another minute to process what he was seeing.

Giants!

A family of giants even! Walking around, and maybe looking for food!

See, giants were just like werewolves, and centaurs and mermaids. They got a bit of a bad rap, because wizarding society didn’t accept anything that was different.

However, Hagrid’s brother Grawp was a full-blooded giant, and he had been fairly gentle and kind, even if he couldn’t pronounce long words. Hagrid and the headmaster of Beauxbatons were both half-giants, and they were also, good people.

So the sight of this many full-blooded giants in a group, in their natural habitat, running around free – that sight was awe-inspiring. Wonderful even.

Harry would have to tell Hermione the next time he saw her.

He noticed that some of the giants he saw were smaller than Grawp. The majority of them were bigger. Like Grawp, they were naked – unlike Grawp, they didn’t seem to have anything between their legs, which made Harry wonder how these Giants would have children.

It was odd, but some of their limbs and heads and torsos were grossly disproportionate to each other. Some of them were missing skin in places, but they didn’t bleed.

Harry had only thought to get close enough to measure how tall they were – at sitting height on his broomstick, he was about a metre tall, and so he could work out that some of the smaller ones were roughly three metres.

He flew within an arm’s length of the largest giant.

The giant’s head swivelled around. Faster than Harry was expecting, the giant threw his hand through the air, as though he was trying to grab something.

That was close! The giant’s hand missed his broom by only a few feet!

:::

It was impossible for the giant to have seen him, since Harry was wearing his Invisibility Cloak.

However, there were creatures that hunted using a sense of smell, or echolocation. His Cloak didn’t protect him from those senses, and clearly, this giant had noticed that there was something amiss, and decided to try and find out what it was.

Harry flew out of range and thought for a minute.

Giants were classified as magical creatures. Since they seemed to be roaming freely around the countryside, Harry thought that he could safely assume that there were no muggles around.

If there were no muggles around, Harry could take his Cloak off without worrying about being hit with a fine for breaching the International Statute of Wizarding Secrecy.

What a relief.

Besides, it was rude to have a conversation where the other person was invisible.

The instant Harry took his cloak off, all the giants stopped whatever they were doing, and started paying attention to him. The shorter – younger? – ones actually ran off to the area right under Harry with big, happy smiles on their faces. They started climbing over each other, trying to grab him.

Harry sighed.

It was part of being the Boy-Who-Lived. People were always trying to grab him, get a high-five, touch his clothes, touch his face, and they fought over each other to do it.

He shrugged it off and turned to the largest giant.

“Sorry, I was invisible earlier,” Harry said to the giant. “You can’t be too careful with letting muggles see you flying on a broomstick. You know how it is.”

The giant only looked at him with a big, wide smile.

“Anyway, my name’s Harry. I’m a bit lost. Don’t suppose you can tell me where I am?”

Harry put his palm out and moved into hand-shaking distance. Actually shaking the giant’s hand would have been impossible, but it was the gesture that counted, wasn’t it?

As quick as a fox, the giant reached up and tried to swat Harry out of the air. If it weren’t for Harry’s Quidditch reflexes and his very fast broom, Harry might’ve gone flying off.

Harry frowned. That was rude.

Maybe these giants only spoke Giant? Grawp had been able to speak English at the end, but he had been taught.

Harry tried miming what he wanted next. He moved his finger in a horizontal surface, and then put both palms out to either side. ‘Where?’

He only got guttural cries in response.

It was then that Harry noticed one of the smaller giants – one of the children, maybe – began to gasp as though she was choking on something.

He looked to the leader, seeing if he would do something to help her, but the leader was focusing steadily on him.

Finally, she made a horrible noise and hacked something out.

“Are you okay?” Harry asked, flying over. If the kids started vomiting, they might need help.

She also swatted at him. Harry was beginning to lose his patience – these giants didn’t seem to understand him, and they also didn’t seem interested in helping him either – when he noticed what exactly, the child had vomited out.

It was a crystal. It was a large, beautiful crystal.

And inside the crystal, were bits of broken body parts.

Human body parts.

What. The fuck.

:::

With a cry, Harry rapidly flew back out of reaching range. The giants ran after him, jumping into the air to try and reach him, and this time, he knew much, much better.

It was one thing to be a giant. There was nothing wrong with being a giant.

It was another thing to be a giant and EATING HUMANS.

That was the thing that the Department of Magical Creatures got called in for. They had executioners, who ‘put down’ dangerous creatures like Acromantulas and Werewolves. Harry was fully against this, firstly, because sapient beings who could think for themselves should never be called creatures, and secondly, because they didn’t deserve to be put down like a dog.

Anything that ATE HUMANS though – no, Harry was fine with those beings being put down.

Fuck.

Still. Giants, as a species, were sentient beings. Everyone who was sentient should get a fair trial.

If he considered giants as sentient beings, then this was auror business. They were criminals, and they needed to be captured so that they couldn’t hurt other people. He would have to open up an investigation, get in translators that spoke Giant, and see what on Merlin’s good Earth was happening.

Until then…

“Petrificus Totalus!”

The young giant that he was aiming at didn’t even try to sidestep the spell.

The other giants around her didn’t seem to care that she was down either. They stepped over her body to try and reach Harry again, making those same guttural sounds.

Were they even sentient?

This was – every bad stereotype of a giant come true.

For good measure, Harry petrified the lot of them from a distance. Even if the other giants hadn’t consumed human flesh, they were responsible for the wellbeing and actions of the younger giants in their group, and they had to be investigated as well.

Once he was sure that they were all solidly petrified, he used Stupefy to knock them all out. The Full-Body Bind could be lifted in time, but only Ennervate could wake someone from Stupefy.

Next, was Incarcerous to tie them up, just in case. Then a shrinking spell, so that they could be captured and tucked into his belt.

Handcuffs wouldn’t work on giants, afterall.

He went off to the nearest village. Hopefully once he found out where he was, he could give the country’s Ministry of Magic a floo call, and hand in the giants for processing.

:::

The first village was empty. The buildings were run down, and worse of all, a large majority of them had suspicious blood splatters all over the woodwork. Broken bones littered the area – a ribcage here, a foot there.

It was obvious that no one had lived in it for a while.

Harry took a deep breath and flew on.

The second village was also empty. So was the third. And the fourth.

Harry remembered the body parts in the crystal that had been vomited up, and began to have some very dark thoughts.

Was this what feral, uncultured giants did?

There had been humans living here at one point, so this area couldn’t have started off as giant territory. It belonged to humans. And then somehow, now there were giants everywhere, and no signs of any living humans in any village.

Had they been invaded by the giants?

Harry didn’t know. He didn’t have the answer to these questions.

What he did know, was that it would get dark soon, and he was currently in the middle of Giant territory, and these giants ate humans.

He needed to bunk up somewhere for the night. And he would need time to make it safe.

:::

There was a forest nearby. Harry flew deep into the forest – hopefully all the trees and branches the giant had to pass would slow down the giants a little – and he found one of the tallest trees near the centre to make his Homebase.

This sort of work needed the Elder wand.

Diffindo, to cut down the trees near his Homebase. He wanted a small clearing around his chosen tree, so that he could see 360 degrees in all directions around it.

Diffindo again, to cut the wood into regular, rectangular planks. The Elder Wand read intention, which was good, because Harry didn’t have a ruler, and he didn’t know any spells that would’ve allowed him to cut things regularly otherwise.

Feather-Light spells, and then Wingardium Leviosa to lift all the planks.

His chosen tree split into two strong sturdy branches near the top, and this was where he built the base for his treehouse. First, two planks to connect the branches together. Then a grid of planks above those planks, attached to each other with permanent sticking charms.

From that point on, it was easier.

He laid planks horizontally on the base, and this became the floor. Next were the support beams for the walls and roof. He laid the planks vertically, and these became walls.  
Now he had basically, a wooden box with a lid.

Once he stuck all the planks together, he cut windows into his treehouse with Diffindo. One for each wall.

Next was the roof.

A few beams across the top, and then more planks above that, so that it formed an upside down V. Harry had to do a bit more cutting so that everything fit in its proper place, but at the end of it, he had a perfect treehouse, built with no rulers, no gaps, and seemingly without nails or rivets or any kind.

The whole process had taken him two hours.

The beauty of permanent sticking charms was that they didn’t fade. A wizard needed ‘finite incantum’ to stop them from sticking, but until then, it was stronger than any kind of industrial strength super glue, all while being completely invisible.

Harry took a moment to admire his hard work, and then he got down to the nitty-gritty bit of it.

Reinforcing charms on the branches supporting his treehouse – right now, it weighed about as much as a couple of feathers, but once Harry was standing in it, he didn’t want it to break. Protection against fire, runes carved along the base of the treehouse. Water and insect-repelling spells on the roof and empty windows.

Most importantly, muggle-repelling charms along the clearing, so that in the very off chance that someone was wandering lost in the woods, they wouldn’t see his treehouse.

He looked at the shrunken and petrified giants in his belt. What he really wanted was giant-repelling spells. The villages that he had seen…

Giants were magical creatures. Someone had let the International Statute of Wizarding Secrecy lapse, and let these giants loose on what had obviously been muggle villages.

As an auror, it was his job to protect the innocent. It was his duty especially, to protect muggles who didn’t know any better, from being attacked by creatures from his world.

He would work towards that end.

:::


	2. Chapter 2

In his earlier Hogwarts years, Harry had thought of transfiguration like – maths. A subject that every witch and wizard had to learn, but one that would ultimately be useless in real life. When would he ever need to transfigure a gerbil into a teacup?

Now, he was thanking Headmaster McGonagall for all her efforts.

Even if transfiguration wasn't permanent – he could transfigure a tree branch into a mattress, and leaves into a pillow, and use cushioning charms and whatnot so that it would feel like a bed.

He took his clothes off to sleep – but he kept his wands nearby. Holly wand under the pillow. The Elder wand stayed in his ankle holster. He never took that off.

Harry made a small cage to put his shrunken titans in, and he left that in the corner of his treehouse.

:::

When Harry woke up in the morning, he used scourgify to clean his teeth and clothes.

He grimaced. It never worked as well as actually brushing your teeth, or cleaning clothes with soap and water – but in times like this, Harry had to make do.

What was he going to do now?

Harry still had no idea where he was. Judging from the state of the villages, Harry would probably have to reach a wall before he could find people who knew where he was.

In the meantime, he had a situation. There were hundreds and hundreds of these feral giants roaming the countryside, and wherever he was, the Ministry of Magic didn't seem to be doing anything about it.

Time to send a message to Hermione.

Harry pulled out the Elder Wand, and used it to form his patronus. The stag bowed and walked around his treehouse.

"Hey Hermione," he said, recording his message. "Don't know where I am, but there are giants that have been eating people here. I think I could be in Giant territory? Ministry's not doing anything about it. Maybe you can find me."

If one person could find out where he was, it was Hermione. She would probably try to cross-reference giant habitats with giant culture and find Harry purely through research. He hadn't wanted to use the patronus before because it would've been much easier to find out where he was, and then simply apparate home if it wasn't too far away.

Until then…

"Go to Hermione," Harry told his patronus. Instead of running straight into action though, the stag only tilted his head and looked at him quizzically.

"Didn't you hear me? Find Hermione."

His patronus still didn't move.

"Find Ron Weasley?" Harry said instead, raising an eyebrow. Maybe Hermione was being blocked by warding or something – not that Harry had ever seen a ward capable of stopping a patronus from passing through.

It didn't move.

"Ginny Weasley?"

When the same thing happened… Harry started to wonder.

"Point me Hermione Granger," he said this time, and the wand simply – spun around and around in circles.

"Point me Ministry of Magic!" he tried again. The wand did the same thing.

Point me was a very basic spell – you asked it to get you somewhere, and a blue arrow would appear, pointing in the direction you needed to go to.

Even if Hermione was very, very far away, there would still be a direction.

Harry looked at his spinning wand and realised.

Something was very, very wrong here.

:::

At his Firebolt's top speed, he could get to one wall in an hour.

He picked the wall behind him first.

Harry made sure to fly at a height far beyond what the giants could reach. He flew in a straight line, and when he made it to the wall, he dropped a hundred metres to stand on the top.

From the wall, he could see that the land beyond it only had more wilderness and giants. There wasn't a single village to be seen.

This wall was also unkempt. There were small holes through the wall and parts of it were crumbling, falling down. It hadn't been maintained in a while.

Underneath his Invisibility Cloak, Harry had the sudden fear that maybe the other wall was the same. That he was out here, in giant territory, with no humans around and no one to keep him company.

If that was the case, Harry was going to have to get his house up to scratch very quickly, and decide what to do about food. He hadn't eaten anything since breakfast yesterday. Even now, his stomach was rumbling.

With the knowledge that this wall led nowhere, he headed back to his Homebase.

:::

Food. This was not something that he could put off for much longer.

Accio to catch a bird on his broom. Stupefy to stun it.

Unfortunately, there was no spell that would allow a wizard to instantly remove the skin and guts of an animal, or one that would remove all the blood. If Harry had gone into the Dark Arts, he would've learnt the Entrail-expelling curse, and then he wouldn't have to go through all this trouble of removing animal guts by himself.

Harry used some of the leftover wood as kindling and Incendio to make a fire and soon he had Unidentifiable Bird happily cooking on a spit in his treehouse. He had to fire-proof the floor first, and the smoke was annoying – in retrospect, Harry thought that he should've cooked outside, and let the wind take the smoke away.

As it was, he had to keep casting Deprimo every now and then to blow the smoke away.

Once the business of eating it was done, he vanished the remains and scourgified his hands.

Now, he would think about going to the other wall.

:::

Harry was on his way to the other wall, when he heard a faint booming noise echo through his valley. It sounded like cannon fire.

It was enough to make him curious. What could have caused that sound? Was it an explosion? Actual cannon fire?

The giants he had seen so far didn't seem like they were capable of that kind of technology. They hadn't even progressed to using stone tools.

That left – human beings. Villagers who had survived the raids on their villages? Had they banded together and found a new sanctuary elsewhere?

The sound came from another forest of trees. It took him some time to arrive, and when he got there, a female giant with blonde hair was rapidly running out of the group of trees.

It turned Harry's head. That giant was fast! He was going to go after it and do the same thing as he had done with the other giants, when he noticed that there was blood on her hands.

Fresh blood.

That meant that there were people who were hurt, probably inside the group of trees.

Harry wanted to follow the female giant, but he couldn't ignore the possibility that maybe there was someone in that group of trees who was still alive. Then he had a moral obligation to help them out.

In auror training, you were worth less than nothing if you went after the enemy, and as a result, their victim died. If they died because you were too busy trying to run after the bad guy, and you forgot to take the innocents to a hospital… It showed that you had the wrong priority.

This was the same situation.

With one last look at the female giant, Harry entered the forest, keeping a lookup for the sight and scent of blood.

:::

The first person that he saw was a man. He had been tangled in his wires and hung limp from a tree. Harry cast a diagnostic charm, just in case, but it told him what he already suspected.

The man was dead.

The next few were all the same. Dead. Dead. Dead. Some of them were still intact. Others had missing heads, missing arms, torsos cut in half.

The carnage was as bad as some of the things he had seen as an auror. It ranked with the necromancy cases, the attempted demon summonings, and the human trafficking investigation.

All of the dead people were wearing green cloaks. They had an emblem on their cloaks, white and blue feathers overlapping. They had white pants and black boots, and a majority of them also had a machine strapped to their hips. Harry wondered what it was used for.

Harry was this close to leaving the forest and continuing on his way – it didn't look like he could do much for these people, afterall – when he saw a young woman lying at the base of a tree.

Judging from the blood splatter, she hit the tree at a higher height, and then slid down all the way to the bottom. Her body, like the others, was drenched in blood.

Harry grit his teeth and did the diagnostic charm. Her spine had snapped. There was a head injury, she had hit the tree face first, and her cheekbones had caved in from the impact. Blood was pouring out and –

She was still alive. Barely.

Harry couldn't believe it. He landed his broomstick, knelt beside her and took her pulse quickly, and while it was very, very faint, her heart was still trying frantically to pump blood around her body.

He looked at her again.

Harry wasn't a healer. He didn't know how to treat injuries beyond the basics, and his only healing spell was 'Episkey.'

What he did have was skele-gro in his magical first aid kit. It would not be pleasant, because Harry would have to vanish the bones first, and Harry didn't know if muggles could survive that.

She also had a head injury, and that could go either way. This girl might still die.

Harry had only really wanted to find out where he was, so he could go home. He wanted to help people, but he didn't want the responsibility of having someone die on him again. He didn't want to use up his potions when he might need them later, and when the girl could die regardless.

Was that selfish?

What would Hermione do?

…

Hermione would've probably shoved him over and started yelling – Harry! Why are you thinking so hard about this! You have to at least try.

She would probably be quite mean about it too, he thought ruefully.

Dumbledore would tell him again, that we all had to choose between what was right and what was easy. He would talk to Harry about the quality of mercy.

With that thought, Harry sighed and looked around, double checking that there were no muggles around. It probably wasn't safe to move her too much – she had lost quite a bit of blood – but at the same time, apparating with a person this heavily injured was just asking to be splinched. How could he focus on having all the right body parts appear where they needed to be, when her spine was broken?

He grabbed a blood-replenishing potion first and poured that down her throat. He had to do something about that first, because it was the first thing that would kill her. Once that was done, he petrified her, locking her body into stasis where it wouldn't deteriorate. He shrunk her down so he could carry her away from the trees.

Then he got to hopping back to his treehouse with his new (and first ever!) patient.

:::

The skele-gro seemed to be doing its job. When he vanished the spinal vertebrae, Harry had been worried, because it seemed like the backbone was a very important series of bones to lose, but everything seemed okay so far.

It wasn't just her spine. Her collarbone had snapped. Her ribs and pelvis were a complete mess, having shattered into many different piece, and Harry hadn't noticed the first time because it was all under her cloak. Her hips had dislocated. There were also various hairline fractures throughout her arms and legs.

She hadn't just hit a tree face first, and then slid to the ground. Something had mashed her into a tree from behind.

What Harry was really worried about wasn't her bones. That would be fine in the end. Harry didn't have a spell to repair broken bones, so they were going through everything the slow way, vanishing the bones, and then regrowing all of it. At the end of the week, though, her skeleton would be flawless.

Harry was worried about internal injuries. The organs in her abdominals, her lungs, her diaphragm. Her spinal cord. Harry didn't have spells to deal with them either – if he ever got hurt, her healers at St Mungo's did their thing and most wizards and witches were right to go home straight away, provided that no dark curses had been used. Physical injuries were nothing for those healers, no matter how severe.

So all Harry could do was pour blood-replenishers and healing potions down her boneless throat and hope for the best. He had tried Episkey a few times with the Elder wand, but he didn't know how much that would help, since it was only a minor healing charm.

It was fine for skin. All her cuts were closed. She wasn't leaking blood through the skin. Her bruises didn't seem to be getting any darker, so Harry hoped that meant she wasn't haemorrhaging into her body cavities either.

"I really need to learn a spell for ruptured organs," Harry said to himself, sitting back down on the floor.

The sun was setting. He could tell from the way the light was falling through the leaves. It had been a long day, and again, the only thing he'd had to eat all day was the bird.

Did he need an IV drip for the girl? This was massive trauma. She wouldn't be getting up anytime soon, and he'd probably need to get her to eat something.

He looked at her again. It was a good thing she was out cold, because as it was, she was a naked sack of jelly lying on a transfigured sheet on his treehouse's clean floor.

If nothing else… if she died, he could clean her clothes and then wear them. They were only a few inches apart in height.

:::

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Guess who this lovely lady is :D


	3. Chapter 3

There was a girl who had been inches away from death lying in his treehouse, so finding a way to get home took a seat on the backburner, at least until she got better.

Understanding that he might be here for a while, Harry set about improving his treehouse.

Harry had been planning on using multiple expansion charms on his treehouse, so that his little box was a veritable mansion inside. Now that he had someone who could be a muggle inside it though, that was out of the question.

If she woke up and started asking questions Harry couldn't answer… Harry would have to obliviate her. Which probably wasn't good for her.

As a last ditch effort, Harry tried using the Resurrection Stone to call on people for healing lore and magical advice. He tried Madame Pomfrey, and then he tried various famous healers throughout history that he knew to be dead for sure, and no one responded to his call.

He tried Albus Dumbledore, because Hogwart's old headmaster would have always come to him if he could. He tried his parents. No one came.

It was a really, really bad sign. If the Stone didn't work, then maybe it was broken, but if his Patronus couldn't reach the people he wanted to, and Point Me was giving him strange results?

Harry didn't know what it meant, but either way. Harry was going to be here for a while.

It wasn't too bad.

Harry had managed to construct more rooms for his treehouse now, so that there was a living room, a bedroom, a 'bathroom' – which was really a room with a wooden bucket in it – and a room he hoped to one day turn into a kitchen. He had a wooden table in the kitchen, and wooden chairs, and wooden plates and utensils, which he spelled with imperturbable charms so that they were waterproof. This way, he could wash them the same way as ceramic or plastic plates, without worrying about fats or oils clinging to the wood.

It was most definitely a misuse of that charm. But hey, whatever worked.

He had also worked out a system where he caught and ate Unidentifiable Birds. He was getting tired of eating what amounted to chicken every day for breakfast, lunch and dinner, but until he could identify which of the plants in the forest were dangerous, and which weren't – he would stick to birds.

He had set up a rainwater tank outside the kitchen, for eventual connection to a sink and things like that. It hadn't rained once in all the days that he had been here, but he figured that would change.

It wasn't particularly because he needed a rainwater tank – Aguamenti at any time for fresh water – it was only – once the girl woke up, he would have to really scale down on his magic, and he needed to have an explanation for how he got water.

She was looking better.

Harry hoped to talk to her once she woke up. If she could tell him where they were, he could apparate off and get real, professional help for her. The treehouse wasn't foolproof, but he only needed it to look muggle enough for the time it took for him to squirrel her away to a hospital.

If she told him that they were somewhere in the UK, there was no risk. He could apparate straight to St Mungo's. If they were somewhere else, Harry would have to locate the local Ministry and organise a portkey. He wasn't stupid enough to try and apparate across an ocean.

Godric, he hoped that they were in the UK.

:::

"Hey, can you hear me?"

Petra groaned.

She didn't want to wake up. Her body felt like she had been trampled over by a horse, and then run over by the chariot behind it.

"—hurts," she said.

"Drink this, you'll feel better," the voice said. A container was pressed to her lips, and she obeyed, not feeling well enough to do anything else.

Eventually, the pain faded away. Now everything was numb.

"How are you feeling now?"

"Better," she said. Finally, she was able to open her eyes and look around her.

She was in a bedroom. She was in a bed, and sitting in a chair next to her was a boy in a strange-looking cloak. A cup and beaker sat on a bedside table beside her head. Everything was made out of wood.

On her other side was some space and then an open window. Outside, there were branches and leaves, and she could hear birds singing.

It was a comfort to her. Because the last thing she could remember was –

"Did we get the female Titan!" Petra exclaimed, reaching up and grabbing onto the boy's cloak. "Was the mission a success?"

"… I don't know," he answered with an honest face. "I was hoping you could tell me. I found you under a tree. You were the only one who was alive."

That's right. The female Titan had stomped her into a tree…

With a sudden sense of unease, she pulled off her sheet in one stroke. Petra wanted to see what the damage was.

She wasn't expecting what she actually saw.

Sure, there were a number of ugly bruises all over her body. But her legs were attached. She wriggled her toes, and she was surprised to see that she could still feel them. There were no bones sticking out of her skin, nothing looked broken, and correspondingly nothing was splinted.

"It kicked me into a tree," she said, eyes dilating from the memory. "It hit me so hard… I was sure I was dead."

The boy had looked away the minute Petra had dramatically pulled the sheet off herself.

Oh, that's right. She was naked.

She pulled the sheet back over herself.

"I think you were really lucky," he boy said, smiling. "It sounds like maybe it broke a few ribs, and it took you out of the action, but nothing was damaged permanently. The ribs didn't go through your lungs."

It had hit her back. Petra could remember nothing else but the bark of the tree trunk, and the sensation of burning pain all along her body. She didn't even have time to scream.

It all happened so fast. She thought it had killed her.

But…

The evidence was in front of her. The stomp hadn't even broken her legs. She mustn't have hit the tree very hard at all, and instead thought she did, because she had never felt that sort of pain before.

It knocked her out. If it hadn't knocked her out, she could've gotten back up and started attacking again. She would have.

"Can you get Levi-taichou? I have to talk to him. He must be very worried about me."

"Sure, we'll get you home when you get better."

"It's very important," she insisted. "We have to talk to Levi-taichou right away."

"I'm sorry," the boy replied. "But I don't know who he is."

Petra frowned.

"Aren't you part of the Survey Corps as well? You were… collecting the fallen after the operation and you rescued me. You must know who he is."

Levi was her team leader. He was also the second-in-command after Erwin, and a very memorable personality. He was short and rude and he had an anal-retentive cleaning streak a mile wide, but he was also the best soldier in the corps. He was absolutely beautiful in the air.

How could this teenager not know who Levi was?

"I should've said," the boy continued. "I'm not with the Survey Corps. I'm just someone who found you under a tree, and thought you shouldn't be left there. You're in my home right now."

He looked a bit like Eren, now that Petra thought about it. Black hair, green eyes. Eren didn't wear glasses though.

"Anyway, my name's Harry. What's your name?"

"Petra Ral, member of the Special Operations Squad under Levi-taichou!" she said, moving her hand over her heart in a salute.

"Thank you for rescuing me and taking me into your home!"

And then because she was still very confused…

"But you must be a part of the Survey Corps."

"Why is that?"

"Because only the soldiers from the Survey Corps go beyond Wall Rose. It's too dangerous otherwise."

It was too confusing to figure out at the moment. At the moment, all she cared about was that she was okay, and that she needed to know if the operation was successful.

Considering that all her other team-mates died.

Levi-taichou must be very sad.

"Where are we?" she asked finally. "Can I send a message to Levi-taichou to let him know I'm okay?"

"We can do that," Harry nodded. "I get it now. Everyone's behind that other wall then? We'll get you back there, and then we'll send a message to Levi Taichou."

That other wall?

What?

Petra had a sudden sinking feeling in her chest. Ignoring Harry's alarmed cry, she sat up and struggled onto her feet. He tried to stop her, saying something about how she needed to rest, but she pushed his arm away.

She stumbled over to the window that she could see.

From that window, she saw lines and lines of giant trees, all reaching to the sky.

Below her was a very, very high drop.

This was a nightmare.

:::

"We're still beyond the Wall," the girl he had rescued – Petra – was saying. She sounded like she had gone back into shock. "How is this possible?"

While it was a good sign to see that Petra could walk around – Harry hadn't been sure if her spinal cord could be repaired, thank you Elder Wand – it probably also wasn't too good for her to go back into shock.

"Your home?" she was asking again, looking at him this time. "How can you live here? I thought they ate everyone in between Wall Rose and Wall Maria!"

Harry grimaced. He had seen that some of the giants had gone feral, but he had hoped that there was another explanation for the empty villages that he had found.

Now he had confirmation that every single giant that he had seen was probably guilty.

"I live high in the trees where they can't reach," he told Petra.

"This is amazing," she replied. Her eyes were big with surprise.

"We've been trying to re-establish an outpost beyond Wall Rose for years, so that we can one day claim back Wall Maria, but it's been so hard."

He hadn't known.

"How did you bring all this wood so high up? How could you make a house so high in the trees?"

Time to start lying through his teeth.

"I don't know. This treehouse was already here when I found it."

Should he try and pretend that he was from one of the villages?

"What do you do about food and water?"

"There's a water tank. It's very big, and it stores enough water that I can drink every day and wash up every now and then. As for food... I have traps in the trees, and I come by every now and then to see what I've caught."

Well, he would have to start building some very rudimentary traps now.

She looked down at the drop again.

"This is amazing. I'm glad someone survived being sent away beyond the walls. Or maybe you were a villager? Were you originally from Wall Rose, or were you a villager in Wall Maria? I only thought – because you look so clean, Wall Rose…"

"I don't remember. I hit my head some time ago, and then the next thing I knew, I was being chased by a Titan. I ran into the forest, and it tried to follow me, but then it was distracted by something else and ran away. I found a ladder hidden in the forest, and I climbed up, and I found this place. Once I climbed all the way up, I pulled the ladder up with me."

Petra nodded. "That was lucky."

"It was. But since I don't remember… Can you tell me about this country? I don't know anything about Wall Rose or Wall Maria. Where are we? What's been happening in this world?"

:::


	4. Chapter 4

Once Petra got over her shock, she was willing to answer all his questions.

The titans were monsters which appeared more than a century ago. No one knew where they came from. They had an instinctive drive to eat humans, ignoring all other animals, and they could regenerate, so they were hard to kill. The only way to kill them was to attack a certain spot behind their neck.

They decimated humanity, and humanity was forced to build walls to keep them out. Three such walls existed, up until 5 years ago, when the Colossal Titan and the Armored Titan attacked the outermost wall. Once there was a breach, the other titans were able to enter the area within the wall and eat everyone.

That was where Harry and Petra were now.

After they lost Wall Maria, there was a food shortage. Most of the farmland was in the area between Wall Rose and Wall Maria, and now that there were no more farms here, there was very little food in Wall Rose. The problem was compounded by the refugees that had flooded into Wall Rose from the area that had been taken. There was no food to feed these people either. Crime rates skyrocketed.

In the next year, the King sent 250,000 people outside Wall Rose to reclaim the land. The majority of them were refugees, people who were poor or unemployed or disabled and provided no use to society, and they were all killed.

The food shortage was solved.

Petra thought that he might've been one of the 250,000 people sent beyond the Wall, and she expressed her relief that he had survived.

Harry only nodded, and silently thought that what the King did was morally despicable.

He was concerned about how Petra hadn't known what country they were in, and about the fact that Petra had named the year as being 850 A.D.

But that couldn't be true.

Firstly, that would've meant that he had travelled many, many years back in time. Secondly, he couldn't remember any period in magical history, where a civilisation had been plagued by regenerating giants for a century.

Giants couldn't regenerate. They were very strong, but regeneration was an ability that only phoenixes had. They were also smarter and more capable than what Petra had described these Titans being.

For the time being, he would call them Titans, to discriminate between the Giants he knew, and the monsters he saw these Titans to be.

The concluding statement was: he wasn't anywhere at home. He wasn't anywhere near home, and there was a chance that he might not be getting home anytime soon.

That was why the Resurrection Stone, his Patronus, and the Point Me spell wasn't working. No one had been born yet.

Petra described her life in the Survey Corps. Her dream was to one day seal the hole in Wall Maria and reclaim the land in between. The loss of all that farmland and all those people had hit society hard. Other people had more ambitious dreams: one day, they would be able to live beyond the Walls without fear from Titans. One day, they would be able to explore and meet other civilisations.

One day, they would be able to see the ocean. No one living inside the walls had ever seen that expanse of blue, except in books.

Until then, all they could do was to try and lessen the seemingly endless amount of Titans outside Wall Rose, and to try and establish enough supply outposts so that they could close the breach.

While the tree house was good, in that people stranded beyond the walls had a higher chance of surviving – what they really needed were outposts on the ground, ways to get building resources to Shinganshina District where they could patch the breach. It would be too hard to get those resources up a tree.

The estimated repair time, using the Survey Corps to act as scout and bait and fodder, bringing building resources beyond the wall was 20 years.

Petra got up to talking about her captain, before she was too tired to continue. Harry left her back in her bed to rest, and went away to another area of the treehouse to think.

:::

What to do next?

Harry wasn't going to be going home anytime soon. It sounded like the King had banned old books, but there must a library somewhere that he could try – see if there were any references to magic.

In the meantime, he wanted to help humanity.

The Titans weren't an issue for him, but he saw the horror in Petra's face. The way she had sobbed as she told her story. The many people who had died around her. The remains of all those villages. The sacrifices humanity kept making, to overcome an enemy that was overwhelmingly powerful.

In the face of all that sorrow, how could he not intervene?

He, who was stronger than the Titans. He, alone, who could do something about the problem.

If he wanted to continue his guise as a muggle, he could wait with Petra until she got better. Petra had told him that she was out of 'gas' for her '3D manoeuvre gear' and because of that, she couldn't fly between the treetops. Even if she could, there were wide expanses of open spaces between here and the Wall, and without a horse, she wasn't fast enough to avoid getting caught by a titan.

Since they were safe in the trees and seemingly self-sustaining, her suggestion was that they wait until the next time the Survey Corps came close. There would be other expeditions beyond the wall. The next expedition would come across both himself and Petra, and from there, he could join the Survey Corps.

Harry had thought about it.

Unlike the others, he wouldn't have a fear of death. There would be many Titans, who, about to eat him, suddenly tripped over or gagged, or was distracted by intense pain. The Survey Corps' death rate would dramatically increase. Harry would be considered a hero.

He could make a living that way.

The thing was – pretending to be a muggle, joining the Survey Corps and killing Titans with them wasn't the most productive thing that he could do. It was just what his Gryffindor side wanted to do – now that he had found this girl, now that she had established a very legitimate concern, he wanted her to keep living, and to do that, he had to stay by her side and protect her from the shadows.

But really. His little inner Ravenclaw was clawing at itself, screaming about how the ability to use magic was an advantage! Protecting Petra by joining the corps was risking his life, constraining his potential and denying himself one of the biggest advantages he had! It was setting himself up for a lifetime of paranoia and lies!

Did he really want a life like that?

And besides. The root of the problem wasn't actually the Titans. It was like that old adage about giving a man a fish, and teaching him to fish. If he killed a Titan, sure that was one less Titan in the world to worry about, but there were always more.

Harry couldn't be in many places at once. There would be casualties because he was not all-powerful and omniscient.

But what he could do instead… He could make things unbreakable. The machines they used to fly through the air would never fall apart. He could make things waterproof, rustproof, anything-proof with the Imperturbable charm. Reparo could repair anything. Warming charms, cooling charms. No one would ever again from the cold during winter, and no one would overheat in summer. Applied to objects – he could produce permanent fridges, so that people would be able to store their supplies in their homes, without needing underground basement spaces or salt to preserve food.

An merchant instead of a soldier.

He could produce essential items with much less money and in much less time than the muggles could currently do. He could repair anything also, in much less time.

No one else would be able to make items like did. Since he was the only supplier, he would have no competition.

It would be easy to get rich like that.

And the things that he could make and repair: wasn't that more useful for society? Wouldn't that keep more people alive through winter, isn't that helping the most amount of people in the least amount of time?

Of course, freely using his magic like that. He would have to have trade secrets or organise some sort of protection, so that the government didn't kidnap him in the middle of the night and try to experiment on him.

…A little voice that sounded remarkably like the ex-horcrux in his head said – let them try.

It was also saying – you're not thinking ambitiously enough.

Magic was the power to change worlds. He had the strongest wand, he held the title of Master of Death, and here he was, still trying to avoid the attention he hated as the Boy-Who-Lived.

If he wanted to help humanity, he was still going about this the wrong way. Why?

Because the people in power were corrupt. They had sent a quarter of a million people to die, because it was the easiest, quickest solution. They could have run educational programs, they could installed a country-wide rationing system until the situation got better, they could have put more people in the fields, producing food or finding better, more efficient ways to plough the fields they had. Necessity was the mother of invention, and they had killed it.

That voice was saying to him… When society is corrupt at the roots, you have two choices. You can start your own city, with your own laws. As the leader of your city, you can control everything that happens.

Or you can overthrow the government, and then from there, put in your own laws. If you want to really, truly help society, you need to be in a position of power, so you can guide humanity on where to go, without being repressed from above.

Helping humanity was more than defeating the titans one by one with Stupefy. While it would help, no more titans meant Wall Maria got closed, meant people could get through the walls etc… that goal was only worthy of a Gryffindor. Truly helping humanity meant …

1) Eradicating extreme poverty and hunger.

2) Achieving universal primary education.

3) Promoting gender equality.

4) Reducing child mortality.

5) Improving maternal health.

6) Combating the spread of plagues and diseases.

7) Ensuring environmental sustainability.

Pushing this world from its state of despair, from the brink of human extinction, into the future.

Once the problem of food shortages was solved, freeing the farmers from endless days on the field, the natural development of science and technology would free this society from the small problem of the titans.

:::


	5. Chapter 5

Well. While it was all very nice to have these goals in his mind, achieving them was something else.

First of all, Harry had to acknowledge that achieving these goals would be impossible if he tried to keep his head down and pretend to be a muggle.

He was a wizard. There was no shame in sacrificing the security of anonymity for the freedom to go wild with magic.

When the time came, he was going to trample all over the International Statute of Wizarding Secrecy very quickly, without any regrets. He wasn’t afraid.

Secondly…

It was one thing to talk about a revolution, and then another thing to do something about it.

He hadn’t even seen the city that he was going to save yet.

Harry went back into Petra’s room, and looked at the girl whose story had inadvertently caused him to commit to saving this world.

She looked peaceful.

If Harry wanted to do all the things that he had been thinking about though, taking care of her until she recovered would only delay him. He had done about as much as he could for her now anyway: the rest of the healing was up to her.

“Sorry Petra,” he said to her sleeping body. “You’re going to have to explain your return from death to your superiors by yourself.”

Harry let out a breath.

Baby steps.

Before he could end poverty and hunger, it probably would help if the people got their farmland back.

Wall Maria.

:::

She was in bed one moment, and in the next moment, there was a loud crack, and she was hanging from a man’s arms. Being carried like a sack over his shoulder.

It felt like she was still sleeping, and her thoughts drifted on the wind just as freely.

It was nearly morning. The sun was starting to rise on the horizon.

The man took something from his pocket and she recognised it as the flares she used to signal that a titan was near. It was fired up into the sky, and it left a red trail of smoke as it flew.

Once that was done, he laid her down at the gates. She was only wearing the white shirt and pants that came with the uniform. Her harnesses and gear were dropped down next to her.

There was a commotion then. A lot of yelling. The gate opened.

“Someone’s at the gates!”

“I know her, she’s from the Survey Corps!”

“How did she get back?”

“She’s injured!”

People pulled her in through the gate. They weren’t gentle, but it was an unprecedented situation. Once a person was stranded beyond the wall, it was almost a 100% death sentence.

:::

Petra sat in the infirmary in the Scouting Legion’s headquarters, with her eyes closed and her legs crossed.

Levi was at her bedside this time. His hands were clasped together, and his head was lowered. He had been sitting there, not talking for a while now. Commander Erwin, seemingly ever-patient, sat by his side.

The thread of her sheets was fraying, and she pulled at it, thinking that she had been in a finer bed before. But she couldn’t remember the details, and she was very disappointed in herself.

Finally, her captain began to speak.

“I saw you lying under the tree,” Levi said. “I came back for Eren, and I saw everyone in my squad had died.”

“I thought I was dead,” Petra managed to say to her captain.

“I left to go after the Female Titan, and when we came back to retrieve the bodies, yours was gone.”

His hands tightened.

“I thought some other monster got to you first. What a failure I was. Couldn’t even get a piece of your body back to your father. Not even an arm.”

“We had to abandon some of the bodies we recovered so that we could save ourselves. Then our miserable little troop slunk back into town, under all those glares.”

He huffed. “And your father came up to me, and told me about the letter you had sent to him.”

The letter she had sent her father?

That’s right. Petra wrote him a letter saying that she was going to dedicate her life to the Survey Corps, and especially to Levi, her captain, not because she was romantically interested in him, but because Levi was the best of the best. He was exceptionally talented and his balance was perfect and she wanted to make sure he achieved his dreams.

“Oh,” Petra said with a blush on her face. “I hope he wasn’t too embarrassing.”

Levi made an odd sort of sound. Petra sat up again, concerned that Levi was choking on something, and then realised.

Unlike the others, Levi-taichou didn’t cry when they lost people. People died in the Scouting Legion all the time. It was a fact of life.

In fact, Petra had never, ever seen him cry before. He was so strong.

And she wished that she hadn’t been able to find out now, that Levi was the type of person who expected the worst from life and wouldn’t react to any of that, but lost it when something unexpectedly good happened instead. His tears were silent. She would’ve been happy, going her whole life without ever finding out what Levi looked like with tear tracks down his face.

Because her captain was crying in front of her. For her sake.

She had made her beautiful, endlessly strong captain cry. She wasn’t worthy of her position in his squad.

Commander Erwin cut in then.

“How did you get back? Several people said that they were quite sure you were dead. There was a lot of blood.”

“Was there?”

It couldn’t have been very bad.

“It must have looked worse than it actually was then… A man rescued me. He lived in a treehouse, outside the walls. He said…”

She had to think back. Her memory of those days when she was awake wasn’t very clear.

“He said I’d broken my ribs. But everything else was alright. He said he found me under the tree, and that I was very lucky.”

There was a moment of silence at her words.

“He was very fast to take you. There was only a short amount of time from when Levi reports seeing you, and then when we went to recover your body. How did he move you in your state?”

At this, Petra faltered. She knew that her superiors would ask.

“I don’t know.”

Commander Erwin’s face never changed. “Explain.”

“My memory of the time from when I was rescued by the man to when I was found outside the gates… my memory of that time is very blurred. Like it was a dream, and when I woke up here, the details of the dream had already started to fade.”

Erwin sat there again, in silence while Levi was regaining his composure. His face was returning to his usual emotionless expression, the one that gave nothing away, but instead of looking deadpan, Levi just looked tired.

“Humans don’t thrive outside the walls, when there are Titans around who can eat them,” Erwin said, musing. “You must understand that your story is hard to believe.”

“I don’t care,” Levi said in response.

“Do you remember how he got you to the gate?” Erwin persisted.

“I don’t even remember what he looks like,” Petra confessed. “Everything was a blur.”

She wanted to be able to answer her superior’s questions so badly. She wanted to know herself, but her own useless mind and body were failing her.

“I remember that it was a man, and not a woman, but I don’t remember his face. I remember the wood of his treehouse, and I remember the view from the window, dropping metres and metres down into the forest floor, but I don’t remember how I got to the treehouse. I remember that I was in bed one moment, and in the next, all I remember is that he took the signal flares, and he fired one into the air.”

She lowered her head. “I’m sorry.”

“Don’t you get it?” Levi erupted at her words. “I don’t care. I don’t care how you were saved, I don’t care if they were a man or a bird, or a demon. You made it back. That’s better than most people can say!”

“Levi,” Erwin rebuked.

“Wait! I do remember something!” she exclaimed. “I told him about you, Levi-taichou. And he said that he had a message for you.”

At the time, Petra had been too confounded to question the statement, but now… Even as she was thinking it, she couldn’t believe it.

“Well. What’s the message?”

“He said… He said that Wall Maria has been sealed.”

:::

Commander Erwin walked down the stone steps of the castle, holding a torch in one hand. He was headed down to the basement.

The castle was perpetually cold. That’s what happened when buildings were made of stone – they didn’t catch on fire as easily, and they were harder to break into than wooden houses – but the people in the Corps had learnt from hard experience that not even stone stopped the Titans.

Their strength was monstrous.

What that said about the men who fought them… Were they fools? Or were they greater than the monsters themselves?

At the end of the hallway, there was a door, and the Commander opened it to see exactly the men and women that he had been thinking about.

Officially, this room was a dungeon. Erwin had an office upstairs that he used to meet with the officials that came in from Sina, and it was comfortable and cosy – decorated with trophies and rugs. This room however – there were no decorations. There were maps. There were pins with Titan sightings, and reports and bases outside the wall.

This was his war table.

And around his war table were his officers and his generals. A group of about twenty people, scattered about the room.

And of course, his elite – the best humanity had to offer. Levi, Mike and Hanji.

“There’s been a situation,” Erwin said to the people at the table as he took his seat. He steepled his fingers.

The room went quiet, and Levi stalked over his side. His face was as emotionless as ever.

Hanji took a seat next to Levi. Mike was on Erwin’s other side.

 “As you may already know, Petra Ral was found in front of the gates early this morning. The medics have cleared her for field duty. She should be back in a week.”

Low murmurs.

“That’s good news, isn’t it?” One of his younger officers said. “How often do we get people coming back from behind the Wall alive?”

Mike replied. “Almost never. Once someone has been stranded beyond the wall, their life expectancy starts dropping by the hour. After a day, we consider them dead. Petra’s situation is entirely unprecedented.”

An older officer gave his opinion.

“It sounds like a positive turn for us. If we can replicate the circumstances that led to Petra’s survival, we can make a protocol that would maximise our force’s ability to stay alive beyond the wall. How did she survive?”

Erwin shook his head. “We don’t know. It wasn’t her actions specifically, that led to her survival. She was rescued.”

The room broke into loud noise. ‘That’s impossible’ and ‘what’ and ‘who’, everyone was talking all at once.

Erwin held up his hand, and they all quietened again.

“She reports that there is a man who lives beyond the Wall. He has survived so far by living in a treehouse, which we can only assume had been there before the fall. Provided that someone collects rainwater regularly and gathers and hunts without leaving the trees, it is entirely plausible that someone could survive out there.”

As mind-boggling as the idea was.

“However, there are several inconsistencies with her story, none of which she can explain, given her memory loss.”

Levi sitting next to Erwin was leaning over the table. He tensed up.

“She’s not lying. I picked her out of everyone and trained her from scratch, and it wasn’t easy for her. I know her inside and out.”

His voice was forceful. “She wouldn’t lie to me.”

And then quieter, but just as intense. “If she lied to me, Commander, I would rip her throat out myself. But she’s not. Trust me when I say I would know.”

Erwin sighed. He had no hard feelings towards Officer Ral – he had met all of Levi’s team when Levi had proudly presented them to him, and he made the approvals and signed them all off. She was very good at using the 3D manoeuvre gear, and her balance and speed was almost as good as Levi’s – which was quite an achievement, given her age. The power of her strikes could be improved, and so could her her ability to make quicker decisions, but those were things that would come with time and experience.

 “I’m not saying that she’s lying, Levi. Her confusion seems genuine, and I don’t doubt that a traumatic experience such as hers wouldn’t affect her memory.”

There were just things that didn’t match.

“Eren Jaegar reports that he saw the Female Titan hit Petra. Levi, you saw her body under the tree. You said that she was dead.”

Levi slammed his hands on the table.

“I was in a hurry; not like I could check everyone’s life signs when I’m trying to stop Eren from being eaten! So she was alive and someone rescued her.”

“No, you were right,” Hanji cut in. “She should be dead.”

Her words were as blunt as a hammer.

“No if’s, maybe’s, or but’s about it. We came back to collect the bodies, remember? We couldn’t find hers, but I went to look at the blood splatter pattern. I did the maths. At the speed she was going, and the size of the force that hit her – she should be dead.”

“It’s not just you, Levi. Several other people said they saw her, and she looked dead. The amount of blood that was on that tree – we couldn’t measure it, but there was a lot. Maybe it wasn’t enough to kill her – and maybe I did the maths wrong, maybe Eren thinks she was hit a lot faster than she was, but even if I account for everything ; maybe she was very lucky and it missed all her organs, maybe she hit the tree at an angle that protected her spine – even with that – how do you fall from the air at that height without even cracking a bone?”

“She came back with no injuries Levi. Nothing. Aside from the memory loss, she’s in a better condition than when she left.”

Commander Erwin looked at two of his highest ranking officers – Hanji, who was using her hands, desperately trying to convey what she meant to Levi, who was looking at the ceiling and not listening. Science wasn’t wrong. They both knew that.

Levi had no explanations, but he didn’t care. He could be as tough and cruel as any person from Sina’s underground, but one thing that could be said about him was that was loyal. He didn’t show it, but he cared deeply for the people who mattered to him.

That was why he was still following Erwin.

And there was the problem.

As she was, without knowing the circumstances that led to her survival, Petra Ral was a liability. Erwin was in charge of everyone’s lives in the Scouting Legion, and he couldn’t afford to risk everyone’s lives just because his second-in-command Levi insisted that she was trustworthy.

At the same time, he didn’t want to execute one of Levi’s surviving recruits just because her words didn’t match the evidence they had.

“That’s what we’re here to discuss today, Hanji, Levi. We beg the question: how did Petra Ral return alive, and seemingly without injuries? I open the floor to your thoughts and ideas, your suggestions, your comments.”

:::

“She’s not a shifter,” Levi stated, matter-of-fact. “If she wanted to betray me, she wouldn’t do it like this.”

It was the most plausible theory they had. She couldn’t be the Female Titan, as they were both spotted in the same vicinity at the same time, but Erwin knew that at least one person in his group was a shifter and a spy. There could be more.

“I know Levi, that you just got her back, and that the last thing you want to consider is that she is a traitor.”

There was the matter where someone had dropped her off at the gates. She didn’t get there by herself, so they couldn’t discount her man in the treehouse story.

It was likely that he was a shifter as well.

“Whoever dropped her off at the gates – they’re fast. They dumped her like so much dead meat, and left her there,” Hanji said.

And there was also that other claim that she had made.

“How much do we trust her assertion that Wall Maria is closed?”

“We can’t, until we do a visual inspect of the wall for ourselves. Which is nearly impossible – we have never been able to go that far.”

“What do we do with her?”

That was the key question.

Erwin knew that he could retire her. Let her father bring his child back home, call it a victory and go. It was the most humane situation for her.

Unfortunately, he couldn’t afford to let a potential spy shifter go untracked.

“She’ll be kept off-duty and under observation. It makes sense – she has had a tiring ordeal, and she hasn’t recovered enough for our purposes.”

What Erwin really wanted to do was to chain her in the dungeons, and allow her to be tortured until she revealed all her secrets. Levi would do it, if Erwin ordered him.

Erwin respected Levi too much to force him to do it.

“Until then, watch her.”

:::

:::

:::


	6. Chapter 6

Harry, who didn't know anything about the trouble he had just put Petra in, was getting ready to fly to Shiganshina District on his broomstick.

Now that Petra was gone, he was all alone again. It was different, pouring out one cup of water instead of two. Strange new place, and he had no friends. It was easier that way but -

He looked at himself in the reflection of the water.

Green eyes, glasses, black hair. Nothing really special, but he was an auror, and helping people was his job.

"Time to get to work," he said to his reflection. It nodded back at him.

Shiganshina District was his first look at what a town in this different time period, this whole new place, looked like. Before, he had only seen deserted villages, and they weren't really examples of the lifestyle and technology that this civilisation had access to.

The buildings were stonework and wood, slightly more sturdy than the ones in the villages. There were paved streets. There were cannons, in front of the gate, that looked as though they had been abandoned halfway through loading.

There were dead bodies.

It wasn't entirely unexpected – he saw plenty of dead bodies in his job as an Auror. Flesh-eating giants had invaded the town, anything short of a massacre was possible.

What he hadn't expected was just how much. There were more bones, more body parts, more skeletons here than he had seen in all of the villages, combined.

Harry flew over a large ship, stationed in one of the three rivers that passed by the town. It was about as big as any cargo ship, bearing goods from one port to another, and it seemed to operate on some kind of pulley system, leading the ship through Wall Maria.

The deck of it was packed with bones. Half ripped-off body parts, with some decaying meat still stubbornly attached to bone, bleached white by the sun. It looked as though the Wall opening had closed unexpectedly, and the ship had crashed into the side. Some enterprising Titan had then gotten to the humans on board. Nowhere to run on a ship.

Nowhere to go but overboard.

It went to explain why the skeletons in the water were complete, whereas the ones on board were missing bits and pieces. Many of the skeletons in the water had their hands outstretched, reaching for the surface. Others were curled up, determined to drown.

One of the little skeletons still had the tattered remains of a dress attached to it. Harry looked at it, at the hand still grasping her mother's, and sighed.

Godric. And the smell of it all.

Bloodstains all over the buildings and rotting meat everywhere.

:::

Incidentally, the District was also crawling with Titans. As the only entryway between the outside world and the world inside Wall Rose where all the yummy humans lived, Titans were coming in a few at a time. Some of them were stuck in the District for a while before they managed to find the way out – into the space between Wall Rose and Wall Maria.

All the Titans were coming in one way, and none of them were going out.

They also noticed Harry, which was just the slightest bit inconvenient.

How did they know he was there? He had the invisibility cloak on – there was no way that they could see him. And yet, when he flew over the Titans, they would look in the direction of the sky and reach up, batting the air.

Inconvenient, but not really a true concern, as long as Harry made sure to fly very high up, above where even the tallest of them could reach.

:::

Once the Titans noticed him, they began to follow him around.

Now it was starting to get a bit more annoying. Harry scowled. Obviously all the food on the ground was gone, if they were happy to follow some instinct of theirs that said there was some unseen food source in the sky.

Anyway, the point was to investigate the hole in Wall Maria and see if a quick 'Reparo' could do something for it. If it was only a small gap, then he could cast his spell and then run. It would've taken him all of ten seconds.

It wasn't a small gap.

It wasn't even a fifty meter high gap. It was fifty square metres of missing space.

Fuck.

See, there were limits with 'Reparo'. It could repair broken vases, broken furniture, possibly everything in an entire room in a house that had been struck by an Earthquake if he stretched it – a fifty meter high gap in a stone Wall was not something he could do in one go.

He gave it a shot anyway – the Elder Wand had to be good for something.

It started fixing itself – the stone lifted itself from the ground, and began to mesh together in a corner of the hole – and then the Titans following Harry around blundered right over it, and wrecked all of his progress.

He tried again.

After ten or so tries of this, Harry was cursing up a storm.

"Godric, how many of you are there?" Harry yelled, flying up higher when one of them tried reaching for his voice. "Where do you all even come from?!"

The worst thing though was this: All the Titans were clustered at the spot where the sealed Wall should be. He needed them either on one side of Wall Maria or the other side for the spell to do its job properly, but these Titans didn't seem like they were going to move apart if he asked them nicely.

There were a couple of ways that Harry could deal with this…. There was a spell to stun, and a spell to capture, and a spell to have them fall down, legs bound together. …There was also Imperio, which would make the Titans do exactly what he wanted.

And then there was Sectumsempra. Crucio and Avada Kedavra.

Harry looked at the situation underneath him, at all the misshapen smiling faces beaming up at the sky and frowned.

He was an Auror. And Aurors captured the evil-doers, so that they could be tried evenly and sent to Azkaban.

Aurors do not kill, except when it was absolutely unavoidable and necessary. Harry believed in this. He had seen far too much death; he had come very close to it several times, and he knew the pain that it caused. And even cannibals had a right to go up to a judicial system and explain their actions, and be punished according to what the judge and community thought was fair. When he had made his plans to improve this world, he had imagined stupefying the Titans and putting them in cages, or moving them back outside Wall Maria – but maybe that was naïve.

Harry thought of Petra, and how she had soaked the sheets red with her blood, when he first got her up to the treehouse. He thought of her mysterious captain Levi, and the group she identified with – the Scouting Legion – who gave their lives so that the rest of humanity could survive.

Aurors only captured criminals. They were not meant to be the judge, jury and executioner – but what was justice here?

Maybe it was because he was alone. Maybe because it was because he felt too much sympathy for his fellow human beings, trying desperately to survive when all the odds were against them.

"Too many Titans," Harry noted, flying up higher. "And they're all in the way."

What was more important anyway? His morals or humanity's survival?

Something inside of Harry – cracked.

"Sectumsempra," Harry said quietly. The Titan that had been destroying his repair job on Wall Maria was suddenly split into two halves.

Killing a living being – watching its blood splatter its surrounding brethren – it was a shit feeling.

Even so.

All the titans were clustered at the spot where the sealed Wall should be. Harry needed them either on one side of Wall Maria or the other side for the repair spell to do its job properly, but these Titans didn't seem like they were going to move apart if he asked them nicely.

Harry took a deep breath. He didn't like using this spell but…

"Fiendfyre."

:::

When the fire died down, there was nothing left of the Titans in the area.

Fiendfyre was dark magic. It was a living fire; it despised living things and inherently tried to spread from one creature to another, killing everything in its path.

Even then, it didn't take long before more Titans were approaching Harry.

It took a day and many repetitions of the fiendfyre curse before the hole in Wall Maria was closed.

Even the bottom levels of the newly repaired wall was black with ash.

:::

:::

:::

Harry went back to his treehouse. The cup of water from earlier that morning was still there. He looked again at his reflection in the water.

He turned away. "It's not like this is my first time killing anything," he said to himself.

Professor Quirrel came to mind. Yeah, he'd probably killed that guy. Harry didn't know for sure.

But not Voldemort. No matter what anyone said – Voldemort killed himself. Harry didn't do a thing – about Voldemort's death – he was clean.

It brought back to mind memories about his old headmaster. And what Dumbledore did, what he sacrificed, to ensure that Voldemort would be mortal enough to die.

Dumbledore had sent Harry to his death.

Harry poured the rest of the water in the cup down the sink.

This was some more of the same thing. Making sacrifices for the greater good.

And the step in making that greater good happen – that next step would be to actually check out the world behind Wall Rose.

:::

:::

:::

Jean was walking around in the markets. After the failed expedition to capture the female Titan, the Commander and Captain Levi had been summoned to the capital to account for their actions. Where they would hand Eren over to the Military Police.

There was a delay when one of Levi's old scout members made it back to the Recon Corps by herself. Jean didn't know much about her before, but now her name was famous.

Petra Ral, who survived several days in Titan territory by herself.

Everyone wanted to talk to her. The Scouting Legion had been bombarded with letters from reporters who had heard from the Garrison members who guarded the wall. There were stories about how they had found her, alive and in good condition. But she wasn't speaking to anyone.

"Hey, you're from the Survey Corps aren't you?"

Jean looked at the black-haired man leaning over his stall in the market. The merchant seemed to have a variety of items – weapons like knives and swords, wooden looms and fishing rods, a few mechanical things, and rolls of material that several women were exclaiming over.

"Yeah I am," Jean replied. "What about it?"

"I'm Harry," the man replied with a wide smile. "I'm a fan. Everyone's been talking about the Survey Corps these days, I wanted to know more."

Jean huffed. "Then do the training. Join the corps."

Harry smiled sadly. "I thought about that. But in the end… I think that if I want humanity to thrive, we have to do more than just beat the Titans. We've got food shortages to deal with, and a lot of refugees from Wall Maria who still haven't found work."

This was met with a sigh from Jean. "What can you do about it though? The world is cruel."

Jean just survived his first expedition. He had lived through Trost, when Marco hadn't. When the news about the failed expedition hit the newspapers, the faction that supported the Scouting Legion lost a lot of support – it was hard to justify using taxpayer's money to throw away lives for expeditions that failed.

But now that Officer Ral had returned by herself, she brought along with her a lot of mixed feelings. Maybe there were others that had survived, and were waiting to be rescued? Obviously, the Scouting Legion was maybe doing something right if their members were able to survive outside the Wall.

The people who had been with Petra on that last expedition could guess the truth. No one really knew for sure, since Commander Erwin and Captain Levi had slapped confidentiality rules over everything concerning her. Her first official account was to be to the Capital, where the Commander and Captain would talk about the issue of Eren as well.

"Anyway, what are you selling? You look like you have a mix of things."

"I'm a bit of an inventor and a fixer-upperer," Harry replied, "Most of the time, I just find broken things and fix them. Sometimes though, I manage to make something new in the process, and I sell those too."

He gestured at the rolls of cloth. "You see those? It looks like wool and linen, but it's completely waterproof. It's as soft as feathers and it won't ever stain or crease."

It looked like a scam. False advertising to sell fabric for far above market price, and he told Harry so to his face.

Harry responded by rolling his eyes and tossing a cup of water over one of the nearby fabric rolls. To Jean's surprise, the water just – slid off. It defied logic, because it looked like wool. It should've absorbed the water.

Interesting, but not something Jean really needed. Maybe Harry could read it on his face.

"Or maybe you'd rather get something useful," the green-eyed man said instead. Jean looked at the knives on the table – pretty, but they looked mostly decorative – and maybe Harry saw, because then he pulled something up from under the counter.

It was another knife. Just an ordinary plain old knife, with a wooden hilt. The blade was only as long as his hand.

"Don't judge things by their cover," Harry said, and then without a warning, demonstrated how sharp the knife was on the table.

"This is a trick," Jean said instead, because there was no way a butter knife could cut through solid wood like that.

"This thing will cut through anything," Harry promised. "You can throw it at a wall, and it will wedge itself in there."

He held the knife out hilt first to Jean. "Don't believe me? Try it."

The houses near the market were made of stone and reinforced with wood. Jean moved to the space beside the wall, to something that he was sure the seller couldn't rig.

The knife went right through stone with only the barest amount of resistance. When Jean looked at the blade, there wasn't even a scratch.

"It's a new metal I made," Harry was explaining. "The blades don't get dull and they don't break. The sheath for it is pretty much made out of the same thing as the blade – it'd go right through anything else."

"Okay, I'm sold. How much is it?" Jean said, looking at the knife again.

Harry paused. "I don't normally sell these knives. It'd be really irresponsible of me to put something like this on the market where anyone can buy it. But you know, I think it's really important that the guys in the Survey Corps have the equipment they need to protect themselves against a Titan. So if you can promise me you'll use it only for protection, you can have it for free."

It was a really, really tempting offer. The only problem was, Jean couldn't make that promise. What good was a small knife against a Titan?

"Can't," Jean said, putting the knife down with regret. "We use iron wire propellers and plug-in blades to kill the Titans. I really wish I could take this knife and make you that promise, but I can't."

Harry sat in silence, thinking for a moment.

"I could switch your blades out. If you've got a spare blade or spare gear, I could fix it up. I'll upgrade the wires for you too. It'd only take me an hour."

"And how much would that cost?"

Jean was only asking. There was no way that he would hand his 3DMG over to a stranger, no matter how good his promises were. Captain Levi would murder him.

Harry shook his head. "Look, what I want is… I've got this bloody good new thing, and I'm looking for people to buy it. So I'll go and fix up your 3DMG for free, and then if you like it, you should tell your Commander to come here so I can do it for everyone in the Corps. Every coin I make goes directly into helping the homeless. Refugees and kids in the underground."

He leaned over, slamming his hand down on the table.

"I know your lives depend on the gear, I'm not going to screw it up! I believe in what you're doing. Hey, I'm trying to do the same here, from my end, helping drag humanity out of the mess it's got itself in. I *want* you all to survive and live, and I want you to be able to live without fearing the world outside!"

His green eyes were burning with fervour.

It made Jean laugh.

"You sound exactly like another guy I know." Jean said, finally smiling for the first time since the expedition had finished. "You look a bit like him too. Eren Jaegar?"

Jean was slightly disappointed to hear that Harry hadn't heard of Jaegar. Seriously. They could've been brothers.

They spoke a bit more; it was nice talking to someone who supported the Corps. Jean wanted to know about Harry's work, Harry wanted more information about life in the Corps, death rates, policies, what the training was like. He was surprised to learn that most of the people in the program were there to join the Military Police. The people who were good at killing Titans usually went to the Military Police where their skills were wasted, but arguably, not their lives.

"It's a comfortable life in the interior. I used to want to join the Military Police as well."

Harry thought about it for the longest time.

At the end of the conversation, Harry insisted that Jean keep the Unbreakable Knife.

"As long as you don't use it to kill anyone, I'm good," Harry said with a smile. "In the meantime, show your Commander what your blades could be. If he's interested, I'll be back here in a few days."

:::


	7. Chapter 7

"Hey Armin," Jean said. "What do you think of this?"

Armin looked up from where he was sitting, very deeply in thought. Eren and Mikasa looked up as well. Their eyes were tired; everyone was worried about Eren's fate. Everyone except for Eren, who was just depressed after the last mission had failed so badly. Commander Erwin had been kind enough to put him on parole, instead of locking him up so that he couldn't run before being handed over to the government.

"It's a knife," Mikasa said, flat-toned.

Jean unsheathed it. With a flick of his wrist, he made a seemingly effortless clean cut through the table where they were sitting.

Eren's eyes were wide. "Do that again," he challenged.

Jean smirked, leaned over and drew a smooth cut across the edge of Eren's dinner plate. It went through the ceramic as though it was nothing more than water. Which was impossible. Ceramic and water was not the same thing. If you tried to cut a clay pot with a knife, you wouldn't be able to slice it like a loaf of bread, firstly, because of how tough it was, and secondly, because if you applied pressure, the pot would shatter. Knives didn't cut straight lines on ceramic.

Armin frowned. "Can I take a look?"

The blade looked sharp enough – but how was it fine enough to cut through – Armin took a look at the table – and inch of wood without sawing? He had seen knives that were fine enough to cut through hair – but who had ever heard of cutting a fluid edge in ceramic?

Granted, there were more things out there in the world than what Armin knew. He tried to educate himself through books, but there was still a lot of knowledge that had been suppressed or was forbidden.

"That's amazing!" Sasha cried out. She had been watching from another table, but at the sight of this trick, she stood up and ran over. Following the commotion was the rest of the 104th.

"Guy at the market gave it to me," Jean explained. "He said his name was Harry? He wants to change all our plug-in blades so that it's like this."

"Yes, let's do it!" Eren cried out immediately. Armin had handed the knife over to him, and Eren was testing it out repeatedly on the table, on his own damaged plate, and then through the floor.

"It's so smooth," he marvelled.

"What is it made from?" Armin asked Jean, looking at Eren's work still. "It looks like steel, but that's impossible for its weight. The blade of a knife sharp enough to cut through wood – has to be very thin. A blade that thin would break when you tried to cut anything with it – so what is it made from?"

Jean shrugged. He didn't know. All he knew was that it worked.

"Harry?" Connie interrupted. "Harry Potter? Black hair, green eyes, looks like Eren's older brother?"

Finally, Eren put the knife down. Good, because Eren's gleeful stabbing had been starting to freak Jean out a bit. "My brother?"

"He looks a lot like you. Harry's a bit older, he speaks differently and he wears glasses, but he's got your hair and your eyes. It's uncanny."

"I don't have any brothers or sisters though."

"You know him?" Jean asked.

Connie nodded with wide eyes. The new merchant had appeared in the markets very recently. He'd set up a stall, nothing but a counter and a roof, and a stack of barrels behind him. The real surprise was what was in the barrels. Salt.

There were only a few salt mines within the wall, and less now that Wall Maria was gone, so salt was rare. It was extremely expensive and labour-intensive to harvest the huge amount of salt needed for food preservation and seasoning, and only the rich could afford it. But it was crucial for the preservation of food. Beef and pork could be salted and dried as joints, hams or sausages. Butter could be salted. Fish could be salted. Food that was salted could last for years.

To see someone selling salt by the barrel… the new merchant became very popular very quickly in the farmer's market.

"My Aunt buys salt and other things from him. He's well known."

Krista added in her two cents. "I heard he's got a commission from the King's office. He's supplying them with a thousand rolls of silk."

Bertolt and Reiner turned to each other. "He's had a few posters up around the place. He's been hiring people all over the place," Reiner replied.

"What does he need people for?"

"Finding things, selling things. Manning his stalls. Giving out food," Bertolt answered. "He set up a house just outside the marketplace and turned it into a 'soup kitchen.' Hired a whole bunch of people to cook food. It's an hour-long wait for a breadstick and a bowl of soup, but it's free for anyone under sixteen years."

"Is it poisoned?" was Ymir's startled response.

"That's a lot of food. Where is it all coming from?" Armin asked.

"I don't know. He's rich, isn't he? Maybe he had it stockpiled somewhere," Reiner said.

"He's giving away free food?" Sasha said with big stars in her eyes. "We should visit!"

"We need to talk to the Commander first," was all Jean said.

:::

:::

:::

Previously, in the life of Harry:

"What are these? These are not the King's coins," the blacksmith said to Harry, peering at the galleon Harry had presented to him.

Harry had been hoping that the blacksmith wouldn't notice the goblin head on the galleon, but he supposed that was a bit of a stretch. The goblin had very large ears. Still, needs must, even if it was a bit of a travesty to destroy a Gringotts galleon this way.

"They are not the King's coins, but they are coins of solid gold," Harry prompted. "Does it matter? They're going to be melted down."

"How many of them do you have?" the blacksmith said dubiously.

Wordlessly, Harry emptied his bottomless moleskin pouch onto the table. The coins formed a pyramid, before toppling off the mound and rolling underneath the table.

"Is 10 gold coins enough for your labour?" Harry asked.

"You can spare more."

"I could visit another blacksmith."

Just as wordlessly, the blacksmith got to work.

:::

"Are you sure you want to buy all the fabric in the store?" The seamstress said, with some confusion.

It was a year of her work, spinning wool into yarn, cotton into thread, and then weaving it all together to make cloth. She had everything; wool, linen, sheepskin, cotton, silk, lace and taffeta.

"I do. And if you could make more of it, that'd be great," Harry said before walking off. "I'll come and collect it all tonight, don't be surprised if everything's gone in the morning."

:::

"I'm afraid this is the rubbish heap. Everything here's rusted or broken, it's not fit for anything but melting down, sir."

"That's fantastic," Harry said with a big smile. "I love broken things! I'll take it off your hands."

:::

"What sort of marvellous fabric is this?" the clerk said, watching as the water slid right off the velvet. Throwing water onto the fabric was becoming a bit old at this point, but Harry smiled patiently anyway, while the woman and her friends did the usual thing, rubbing their hands across where the water had been.

"Velvet, but with my own special coating on it," Harry said in a very dry voice. "Every coin you spend goes directly into helping the poor little homeless kids who live in the underground."

They didn't seem to care.

"This is worth a fortune! I can't imagine the clothing that's possible with this. Do you think Lady Schowell will be interested?" she said to her partner.

"We must show her. She'd love to have a dress made out of this, she's always complaining about her clothes…."

Harry raised his eyebrows when he heard how much they wanted to buy, but if they could afford it, it was their's.

:::

"You have a lot of miscellaneous goods up for sale," his neighbouring merchant said, looking over at his stall. She was the daughter of a baker, and her job was to smile prettily and sell the cakes her mother made.

Harry shrugged. "I'm really good at fixing things. Do you want all these farming tools?"

They looked like they had just been built, the metal on the spades, rakes and hoes were gleaming in the sun.

The other merchant shook her head. "There isn't enough farmland to go around. Many of the farmers have had to find other work."

"I might keep them with me for a while then," Harry replied. "Know anyone who's still looking for work?"

"I might know a few," the baker's daughter answered.

She was looking over at the decorative items he'd put on the table. There was a hair comb that he'd found, adorned by a pair of birds, and when she noticed Harry's regard on her, she looked up guiltily.

It hadn't cost him anything – it had been snapped into two when he'd found it.

"Swap you that for one of those cakes," Harry said, and she happily agreed.

:::

"Lady Schowell loves the velvet you've made, and she wants to know if there's more," the woman from before came back and said.

"Oh?" Harry said. He was about to close up for the evening. The baker's daughter had called one of her friends, and she was going to come tomorrow and take over selling the items for him. That'd leave him time to do more things, instead of standing around all day waiting for customers.

Another one of her friends was to find more unusable items for him to repair. They were to buy these damaged items with the money Harry gave them to start off with, and leave them at the stall, where Harry would come by to collect his earnings, pay both workers for their work, and discretely repair, shrink, and apparate these items to a stall in a different District.

"She was holding a tea party, and her guests were quite impressed by her new purchases. There's quite a number of interested parties," the servant replied. "Lady Tarsus, Lady Arbela, Sir Carvalis."

Harry thought about it for a second. He could wake up early, apparate North, buy the stock there, charm it, and have it here ready to be sold by mid-morning at this stall.

"Sure, come back tomorrow at noon."

"Lady Schowell wants to know if you have anything in red," the servant continue

Colour-changing charm. Easy.

"Of course I do. It costs more, but I can dye them in any colour she pleases, if she lets me know beforehand," Harry answered. "A day before will do."

"I'll let her know," the woman replied, and left.

Once she left, Harry covered the roof of his stall with a large cloth, so that it would hang over the sides and obscure everything from view. Once inside, Harry set up his ultimate anti-theft device – the muggle repelling charm. It was the same magic they used to deter muggles from entering a Quidditch Pitch. People (or a burglar) might approach, and then suddenly remember that they had something to do a mile away, turn around and leave. He'd have to take it off in the morning, before his store assistant came, but that was fine.

Two minutes to cover the stall, half a second to cast the spell, and then Harry was apparating away into an alleyway in Sina.

Time to actually find those people he'd promised to help.

:::

:::

:::

"I don't have time for this," Levi said when the group of cadets first approached him.

The Commander was dealing with finding a way to present the results of their expedition in a manner that was friendly and pleasant to the ears. In turn, Levi was supposed to somehow present Petra's case so she wouldn't die, and also, save the Jaegar brat from the Military Police's firing squad.

Normally, dressing up and dealing with the fallout of the mission would've been Levi's job as well. However, Erwin knew that Levi hated all the rich assholes that made up the government and the King's Council, and so, Erwin, that bastard, decided that he would take on shouldering this burden by himself.

His eyes were compassionate when he told Levi to focus on Petra and Eren.

"I'll deal with everything else," the Commander had said.

"My leg isn't that injured," Levi told Erwin. "I can still kick your arse."

"You're welcome," Erwin said with an insufferably big smile.

So far, Levi wasn't having much progress. Petra wasn't remembering anything else, and his investigations were coming up short. He had managed to put a gag order on everyone involved in Petra's incident, which helped a bit, but now the news had sensationalised the mystery of her survival and turned her into a celebrity instead. She was alive though, even if she was under house arrest, and that was one thing that Levi would continue to be silently grateful for.

"Captain Levi, sir!" Eren yelled. "This is one of the most incredible things I have seen! I think it will make a huge difference in our ability to kill Titans!"

"It could drastically increase the survival of the Survey Corps," Connie continued, more subdued, but just as excited.

Levi scoffed. "Unless your Commander pulls off whatever shit he's come up with this time, you might not have a Survey Corps in the future."

The cadets from the 104th shifted around uneasily. Levi sighed.

Whatever. He wasn't getting anywhere.

He eyed the group from his chair. "Let's have at it then."

Jean pulled out the Unbreakable Knife.

:::

There was a 15cm deep gash in the stone next to Levi's beautiful door. Suffice to say, Levi was paying attention. He had taken the knife from the cadet and tested it, to be sure of its capabilities. The knife hadn't looked like much, but... it was hard to deny the evidence. It had sliced through a stack of Erwin's paperwork without disturbing the paper.

"A rich guy at the market wants to upgrade my plug-in blades into this," Jean said. "For free. Say yes."

"You know the plug-in blades are disposable, right?" Levi said instead. "We go through at least a hundred every time we move out. Sure it's sharp," understatement, if Levi hadn't seen it with his own eyes, he wouldn't have believed it, "but one extra-sharp blade is nothing."

"It doesn't break. It doesn't get scratch, it doesn't get dull," Jean continued. "I won't need to replace my blade again. Ever."

"And it's free." Levi's voice didn't give anyway anything at all.

"Harry says he supports the Survey Corps' goals," Jean said proudly.

Jean thought that bringing news of another supporter to Levi might brighten up his day. He wasn't blind, Eren's long-lost look-alike had money, and a lot of it to spare, so if Commander Erwin wouldn't mind meeting up with him to organise better equipment or some other deal to benefit the Corps, that would be great? The Commander was a really smooth talker. Instead of 'hmmm'-ing, or looking considerate or doing the Levi equivalent of hearing good news though, Levi started swearing up a storm.

"Do other people know that he's invented this new knife?" Levi asked, point-blank.

"I'm not sure," Jean replied, with some confusion. "Harry's a new merchant, but it seems like a lot of people know him."

His captain stood up with a finality, pushed Jean to one side and stalked out the door. Eren looked at Mikasa, and then at Armin. Did either of them know what was going on?

Mikasa shook her head minutely. Armin did the same. The others; Sasha and Connie, Krista, Ymir, Bertolt and Reiner looked back at Eren just as cluelessly.

"Well. Are you all coming?" Levi called over his shoulder.

Jean wasn't Eren. He didn't whoop for job, but he did smile. "Knew you'd see it my way."

Levi turned his head further. Jean's expression dropped when he saw his Captain's face.

"Find him quickly," Levi told the 104th with a grave expression. "The government doesn't like it when new technology is developed and put on the market."

:::

:::

:::

More in the life of Harry:

Underground Sina was rough. It was where all the refuse and rubbish from the world above floated down and ended up. The whole place smelled like piss.

It was disquieting to see that there were people living here, Harry thought. Whole communities, even. Apparently once upon a time, society had considered the possibility of living underground to escape the Titans, and built underground cities. But then the idea was abandoned, and these cities turned into slums.

Everything was in a state of decay. He looked around and saw children walking around, as well as people lying on the edge of the street. There were others eying him warily, wondering what this relatively well-dressed stranger was doing in their midst.

Figuring that he should move on with his business, and quickly at that, Harry approached a group of men, who looked like they were part of an organisation or business. They had that black formal dress thing happening.

"I'm looking to buy a building here," Harry said as he walked up to them. "Do you know where I should be looking?"

They looked at each other. Some tittered, others laughed.

"You don't buy a house," the leader said with a grin. "You find a building no one's using and take it. Or, you find a building you like, and you kick the people inside out."

"You got the money for it?" another one said slyly. On closer inspection, Harry could see that his neck and arms were covered in scars.

Even as he was speaking, the group was already in motion, slowly moving so that they crowded around Harry in a circle. Harry looked around, and noticed that the other people on the sidewalk had suddenly disappeared, and currently the street was empty.

Internally, Harry groaned. He should've expected this.

Clearly, he had a bit to learn.

:::

Ten minutes later, Harry stepped out of a nearby alleyway, brushing dust off his cloak.

He looked around to see if anyone had noticed anything out of the usual – red and blue light bouncing off the walls for example – but that thing where people shut their windows and stubbornly refused to look outside no matter what worked out well for him in the end.

Setting up in an occupied building was cheaper than buying one anyway.

Conveniently, the men had their own place! In accordance with the advice that the men had helpfully given Harry, Harry decided that he would kick his muggers out and repurpose the building they used as their headquarters.

They wouldn't argue. They were currently hogtied in a public space in the heart of aboveground Sina – sure this world had policemen that would come to untie them? Harry had the feeling that they were involved in other things that the police might be interested in…

:::

The front door of the building opened up into a living space, where the muggers had evidently lived, breathed, eaten and slept. It was covered with rubbish. Even the windows were dirty. To one side, was another room with a table, chair and candle – documents about something or another were on the table – and next to this room was a staircase, leading to the second floor. Second floor had storage rooms, third floor was an attic.

Harry frowned and got to work.

An hour later, the whole place was clean. And with the bubblehead spell, finally Harry could breathe!

He'd banished everything off the ground, scourgified every surface, and what was left looked as though no one had ever lived here. He darkened the panes on the windows for now though – Harry didn't want anyone to come in and see what he was doing, afterall.

The documents were filled with numbers; income reports or earnings which Harry didn't care about, so he burnt them all. The wooden table and chair he'd cleaned, and repaired, so that it was now new.

Then he went back through all the rooms and discovered, fuck, they didn't have a bathroom.

It slowly dawned on Harry that no, this place was underground, and wouldn't even have taps. These people lived in the sewers; they were drinking water they collected in barrels.

This was going to be an all-nighter.

:::

The first step was turning one of the upstair storage rooms into a bathroom.

Frankly, Harry didn't have any kind of skill to do with plumbing, so he was going to cheat like hell. He transfigured a rough toilet from the stone of the walls, really, just a cylindrical hole, and then transfigured what looked like a pipe leading away from the toilet and down into the ground.

The pipe was just there for appearances. It didn't go anywhere, because Harry had no idea where he would even dump the waste. What he actually did, was line the entrance of the pipe with a vanishing spell, so any waste that hit the spell would just disappear.

Hopefully people would just assume that the pipe led deeper underground. He'd have to continue that pipe through the first floor too.

So much transfiguration. He transfigured the floor into stone tiles. Then he transfigured a sink – another smaller stone bowl with a pipe going downwards, and stared screaming internally because where the hell was he going to get water for a tap?

Off to the roof. Harry transfigured a crate into a very large wooden rainwater tank. It was lucky it was night – no one saw this massive tank suddenly appear on the roof. He made a hole in the bottom, and transfigured another pipe leading from the bottom of the tank to the top of the sink... and realised that he didn't actually know how the inner mechanisms of a tap worked. As soon as he filled that tank with water, it was going to leak right out of his tap.

There was no spell to magically open a portal, have water come through it, and then have water come out of another portal.

There was no way. To cheat. A working tap.

This was insane. Harry had never needed to learn how a tap worked ever, because he could cast Aquamenti and have water readily appear for him. But obviously, he couldn't stand in a bathroom forever casting spells for all the muggles who needed to use a tap –

They can keep doing what they're doing now, Harry thought. They drew buckets from a tank (no streams underground), and washed their hair in a bucket, and they took baths like that, and they had non-flushable outhouses instead of toilets –

But washing your hands is a basic part of sanitation! He was building a soup kitchen! Did he want to eat his own dirty soup?

The people here have flintlock pistols and cannons, he thought, thinking again. There must be some engineers around. Or maybe there was a working tap in a rich person's house – and he could cut it off and reinstall it in his bathroom?

Godric, Salazar, Rowena and Helga. Jesus bloody Christ, he would have to go investigate tomorrow.

Harry extended the pipe from the rainwater tank so that it led down to ground level. He decided that it was going to operate something like a restaurant – there would be chairs and tables outside, and inside would be a bench where people served food. Behind that bench would be his servers, and behind them would be the kitchen.

The pipe was for the sink in a kitchen. Transfiguring the serving bench, and the kitchen benches were doable. He made a small bowl in one of the kitchen benches, to act as a sink. Hole in the middle of the sink with a banishing charm. And then Harry ran into more problems.

1\. There was no such thing as a fridge. Refrigeration didn't exist. He had no idea how to build a fridge.

2\. There was no such thing as a kettle. Boiling water was the best way to get clean, filtered water, and in an age where death from cholera and typhoid was a real thing, he needed a kettle. He had no idea how to build a kettle.

This would require some work and thinking.

:::

A quick apparate to his treehouse and back, and Harry had wood for shelves. He stuck some planks along the top of the kitchen. He made some more wooden tables and chairs, while he thought about what he could do about fridges and kettles.

In the end, he came up with the idea of an icebox. It was really just a large cupboard with a drawer on top where you could put ice. The ice would cool everything inside the cupboard. As it melted, it would drip water onto the bottom though, so there was a tray at the bottom to collect the water.

It wasn't a perfect solution; someone would have to empty the tray of water at the bottom regularly, and the ice would have to be replaced once it melted.

However, in terms of food shortages; it would help a lot, if people were able to preserve their food. The cold slowed the growth of bacteria – it meant that you could store carrots for three months, and milk wouldn't spoil…

He made the icebox from wood, and let it sit in a corner of the kitchen. Since Harry could though… Harry layered the inside with permanent freezing charms, so that the inside would always stay cold, just in case. When he finally put the ice in, it would really be only for appearances.

As for kettles…

Once he had a proper tap, he would make two pipes – one for cold water, and one for hot water. He would line the inside of the hot water pipe with a boiling spell.

And then hope that no one would ask about how on Earth he was getting hot water.

:::

Once he finished furnishing the upstairs section with beds and closets (one for each of the two other rooms), and transfigured a rudimentary shower area (stone – Harry leeched some of the glass from the windows to make the shower door, and then reinforced all the glass with unbreakable spells) – Harry was ready to consider the other important part of this operation.

Finding food.

:::

:::

:::


End file.
